Project Details

Project: Tank Hip-Hop
Group Show: Retro avantgarde
Location: Kongegaarder (DK)
Opening: 2022-09-01

Tank Hip-Hop was the inaugural project that launched the multi-year "Freedom, Equality and Hip-Hop" series, exploring the fictional relationship between the labour movement and hip-hop culture. The project served as the conceptual foundation for later explorations of how artificial intelligence could be used to create alternative historical narratives about Danish society.

The work initiated the speculative framework that would question whether Denmark might have been freer and happier in a more colourful everyday life with different individual expression spaces than capitalism offers, by imagining scenarios where hip-hop culture had become integrated with Danish welfare state development.

Tank Hip-Hop established the methodology of using counterfactual storytelling to explore alternative Danish histories. The project began the process of using advanced imaging technology and AI as fabulation techniques to create speculative scenarios where the labour movement and hip-hop culture intersected.

The work at Retro avantgarde in Kongegaarder served as a testing ground for the concepts and approaches that would later be developed more extensively in subsequent iterations of the "Freedom, Equality and Hip-Hop" series, including the major installation at Sydhavn Station in 2023.

The work initiated ongoing research into how artificial intelligence could be creatively misused to imagine alternative social and political configurations, challenging dominant narratives about Danish society and opening new spaces for utopian speculation about more community-oriented futures.